Restoring honor to politics - 16 February 2023

I am so old that I remember when an affair, a lie, or a bribe could bring a politician's career to a shattering end.  There were always exceptions, but by and large, corruption or malfeasance would mark the end of a career in politics.  A recent report in NPR asserts (correctly) that shame is no longer a motivator.  

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157049312/george-santos-politics-of-shame

"There was a time when shame was a powerful force in American politics. That time is not now." [NPR]

George Santos (he of many names) is flagged in the article as the poster child of the moment, but there are so many recent examples (McCarthy, Scott, Cruz, Gingrich, Nixon, and more) and new ones continue to arise (Luna).  However, I think the positioning of the assertion is wrong and I want to flip it around because I think a different perspective sheds more light on the consequences.

Honor was once a force in politics, but honor is now dead in American politics. [me]

Where once people would serve in government from a sense of honor, when once their behavior was guided by a sense of honor, that was a time when government was a productive factor in life.  Remember Eisenhower who built the Interstate Highway System?  Remember Kennedy who inspired the lunar landings?  Remember Johnson who brought voting rights to oppressed peoples?  Even Nixon brought us clean air and water through the EPA (although he failed in so many other ways).  

Then came Nixon and Gingrich who discarded honor for self-advancement, who left shame on the sidelines to achieve dubious ends.  Their descendents - from Trump to McCarthy, Gree, Gaetz, Cruz, Rubio, Scott, and others - these people seem to have embraced shame and willful stupidity as badges of honor (irony just died.  Again.)  

When honor is restored to government, then shall we have the government we deserve.

Greenland paddle from a tree, Step 1 - 19 January 2023

Birch trees, particularly silver birch, seem to be popular for landscaping in our area.   Unfortunately, they seem to have a short lifetime as trees go, something around 40-50 years in our area.  To be honest, I am not sure the particular trees I am talking about are silver birch, but that is my best guess.  About 40 years ago, the builder of our neighborhood put three birch trees in our back yard as specimen trees.  They formed a nice contrast against the dominant evergreens (cedar, fir, and a redwood or two - I think the redwood is a specimen tree, too, by the way), but the birches never really liked out winters.  At least, they were constantly shedding smaller branches, but the snowloads would bring down major parts of the tree. 

In a winter storm about five years ago (c. 2018), the two larger trees were snapped off.  One was badly damaged and I removed it, while the other was severly damaged and I was hoping it would recover.  Well, after four years, I decided it was not going to recover, that it was worsening to the point that it was threatening to fall on the house, so I took it down.

Most of the 40-foot-plus tree became bark mulch or firewood, but I kept a 12-foot section from the base of the tree.  My plan is to make a Greenland paddle from it.  With luck, I might even be able to get two paddles from it.  I hope to be able to get an 8-10-foot 8x8 out of the trunk that I can use for the paddles.

I started by leaving the trunk on sawhorses outside the garage.  While this was convenient and gave me free space in the garage (workshop), I think it greatly slowed the drying of the wood that is required to work it.  I used a small chainsaw to remove one side (hidden on the bottom in the photo) in a crude styling of an Alaskan sawmill, but that did not work well.  I finally decided my only option was to bring the log inside the protected space of the house - the unheated garage will keep the log out of the rain.

The log has been sitting in the garage for about two weeks, and it is already looking drier.  This could be wishful thinking; likely is wishful thinking.  As an experiment last night, I took an electric planer and started trying to remove the bark as a poor-man's jointer.  The chainsaw was faster but I think the planer produces much better results.  The resulting wood is prettier than I expected.  All the talk of Baltic birch brings plain grain to my mind, and this looks to be more interesting.  The interesting bit may be planed off in the end.  We shall see.

Unofficially, my moisture meter shows 34%.  I suspect this is optimistic as most of the readings are "off the charts" - too moist to measure.  I hope a few more weeks in the garage will show the needle moving in the right direction.

Speaker of the House 2023, part deux - 15 January 2023

Mr. McCarthy has won his Speakership on the fifteenth (15th) voting round.  This is a 100-year-old record, that is, more voting rounds required than any Speaker in 100 years.  In fact, it has taken one (1) voting round in each opportunity in the last 100 years.  The final holdout seems to have been Matt Gaetz, R-FL.  The House immediately adjourned and then took up foolish votes on the Monday when they returned to the chambers.  We now face a vote on the debt ceiling and the Republicans are again threatening a default.  Yes, there are a few playing games that border on default (e.g., "pay debt interest, military, Social Security, and Medicare bills first" and some are proposing to postpone paying foreign debt holders), but none of these proposals are taken seriously.  In particular, the US payment obligations are so complex and intermingled that it is not clear how to separate out these types ("interest, military, ...") of payments from other types of payments.  Mayhem.  

There have also been a handful of Secret documents found in old offices that were used by President Biden after he left the VP position.  Biden has promptly searched for additional documents and handed them all over.  This is in sharp contrast with Trump's troubles wherein he keeps documents that he is supposed to turn over, and he does not seem to look for documents when asked (he says he looked for documents, but then a search under subpoena finds more documents).  Anyway, Trump obstructs, Biden complies, and the press seems to think the two are somehow equivalent.

The real problem is  Representative George Santos, R-NY.  He appears to be a serial liar, have some real money problems, and running from Brazilian authorities for fraud there.  So Santos hogs headlines that should be about Trump's problems.  Santos is also important because he was a critical vote for McCarthy (in the opening paragraph), and it is not clear McCarthy would be Speaker today were it not for Santos and his vote.  As a result, McCarthy and his team are just ignoring the Santos problem.  The Santos Problem?  Yeah, a demonstrated liar was seated as a Republican Representative in Congress.  The seating of Santos should have been postponed until the legal troubles were sorted out, but this would likely require a replacement and the replacement would likely be a Democrat and so McCarthy et al are just ignoring the problem.  with Republicans, it is always projection.  Today, fraud, tomorrow voting fraud, and so on.

Speaker of the House 2023 - 5 January 2023

Nine votes and Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) has yet to meet the required majority for a win as Speaker of the House 2023-2024.  The BBC has a balanced summary of possible outcomes, McCarthy wins (eventually), McCarthy withdraws, or Dems join up with "centrist" Republicans to select a compromise candidate (Republican). Finally, many commentators are saying that a McCarthy loss (either the second or third BBC conclusions) would lead to the end of McCarthy's political career.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64170729

Although I respect the BBC and generally agree with their analysis, many commentators are falling into the trap that the current crop of Republicans in Congress are old-style politicians, willing to be pragmatic and compromise.  The last few years, indeed, the last few decades since Gingrich, have demonstrated that the old-style Republican no longer exists in Congress and the Tea Party Republicans (including QANON) have taken over.  As a result, we can not use reasoning or pragmatism to predict their behavior.  The current Republican party is dominated by burn-it-all-down members.  Rather like the dog that catches the car after chasing it, they do not know what to do nor how to govern.

McCarthy wins.  I have to see this as the most likely end game.  McCarthy (and his MAGA/Tea Party opponents) have never recognized a loss.  McCarthy will keep pounding until he wins.  The others will finally succumb to loss of honor and give in.  This is the only real way that the Republican House can get to the desired games of investigations, impeachments, and other foolery that they want to pursue.  Eventually, they will give in at this round and advance to the next round.  Advance to the next round?  Well, move to the next round.

McCarthy withdraws.  Although this might make sense with an old-style Republican operating on pragmatism, that does not describe McCarthy.  After two years, Trump still refuses to acknowledge that he lost, and there is no reason that McCarthy should.  Like Trump, he should simply call his fellow Republicans corrupt and object to the cheating voters!  Oh, wait.  Nevermind.

Democratic-Republican compromise candidate.  Again, this makes sense in an old-style Republican pragmatism, but the MAGA and Tea Party wedge of the Republican party would never let the resulting leadership function.  The Democrats might get some committee chairs, some rules changes, and other benefits, but the MAGATs and Qanoners would burn down the Congress.  The "moderate" Republicans that might join this D-R group might argue for compromise to advance their agenda, but there are three problems with this compromise.  First, there are no more moderate Republicans; they are extinct.  I think McCain may have been the last.  Second, the MAGATs and Qanon wedge would stop all progress.  And third, who would want the job?  No Democrat would accept and there are no Republicans that could handle it (no credible alternatives to McCarthy).  Boehner and Ryan were the last two to try, they gave up, and neither of them was a shining example of anything in the first place.  Trump has shown that he is toast, has no weight anymore in the Republican party.  Any Democrat that tried would suffer worse than McCarthy from Boebert, Goetz, and Goser.  

Not considered by the BBC, but there is discussion that an outsider might be selected as a compromise candidate.  Perhaps a now-retired Republican congressmember or Trump himself might be put into nomination.  I really cannot see that.

Somehow, this will all get sorted out and a Speaker will be elected.  Then we descend into the madness that is today's MAGA-Tea Party.  There will be an endless display of regressive investigations, unsubstantiated impeachments, and pointless government shut-downs.  Good times to come.

Photo: Spencer Ridge (view from), Eugene OR, December 2022

Server Consolidation and Virtualization with IBM CDAT - 4 January 2023

In times gone by, I worked for IBM and managed a development group writing system software for Windows running on IBM x-series systems.  This was about 2001-2005, give or take.  We started to do a lot of systems work with VMware and Microsoft on virtualization.  VMware was independent (a start-up) and Microsoft bought "the other" virtualization start-up for x86.  The Microsoft product is now Azure, basically.  

IBM had a lot of customers totally immersed in virtualization, but on mainframes.  Because IBM more or less created virtualization (as a product), their monitor software was called "VM".  You can do that with names when you are first into the market.  But virtualization was a strange, new beast in the x86 world.  (Remember that x86 was still almost pure 32-bit, and AMD64 had only recently been announced; Intel had Itanium as their 64-bit architecture.  But that is a conversation for another day.)  

In working with customers to understand requirements for virtualization on x86, it became clear that customers did not really understand it.  The customers were used to a business model in which every Windows server application got its own (physical) machine.  It was said that "Windows apps do not play well together."  Server-class PCs were consider cheap, about $10K (USD) or so, cheap compared to mainframes based on purchase price, so a new app or new capacity on an existing app meant that the business would buy a new server.  Thus, there were file servers, mail servers, web servers, and business app servers, and each of these was a physical server in a rack.  As capacity demands rose, buying a new physical server became more expensive, so some organizations started looking at virtualization as a solution.

The first problem they faced was estimating capacity.  Since every PC server ran its own app, there was always plenty of performance headroom - well, until there was not.  Capacity was usually easily solved by buying a new, bigger server.  With the march of Moore's Law, this was usually a no-brainer.  As the old server ran out of capacity and warranty, then buying a new server got one all sorts of benefits - faster CPU clock, more memory, faster disks, bigger disks, and a new warranty.  This worked pretty well on a server-by-server basis, but it became clear that replacing all the servers every 2-3 years was expensive across the server-room.  Virtualization came as the answer - buy fewer new servers.  Pretty good, but how many to buy?  Nobody bothered to collect performance data on PC servers.  Until a server started running out of capacity, no one cared becasue each app was on its own server.  No competition between apps means no problems.

Back to my software development group.  There was a delay in the hardware schedule that caused a couple of software engineers to have nothing to do for a couple of months.  I kicked around some ideas for short projects with two colleagues, Jim and Ted (I cannot recall Ted's real name, so let us just run with Ted).  I do not recall which of us actually invented the idea, but our conversation converged on a Windows-based tool that would reach out to Windows servers and collect performance and capacity snapshots, collect the data into a database, then analyze the database to recommend virtualizationo consolitation plans.  This became the Analysis part of the tool.

One of the simplest customer problems was that they lacked actual inventory data - they had no list of servers or applications that they were running.  Well, running through lists or ranges of IP addresses and poking ports for responses would quickly and easily find and identify the Windows Servers.  This became the Discovery part of the tool.  

Consolidation using virtualization was the objective, so the tool took on the working name of CDAT, for (server) Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool.  I regret that we did not get clever and call it something like "BlueScope", "BlueWindow", or some other IBM blue-colored name, but we were engineers and we missed the opportunity.  Seriously, I regret missing this obvious hook.

Customers loved it.  IBM could walk in with a laptop, plug into the customer's network, and run silently and unobtrusively to collect the data required.  The customer needed to enter some network passwords, but that was about it.  The tool did all the data collection automagically.

IBM sales folks love it.   In the x86 Server space, IBMwas an also-ran.  HP, Dell, and Compaq ran the x86 Server world.  IBM got a chance when HP bought Dell.  Customers usually sought three competing bids, so when Compaq "disappeared" into HP, IBM became the their option, even if HP and Dell were the only "real" players.  To exploit the new foot-in-the-door to become the third bid, the technical support engineer could collect data for a day or a week, spend a little time with spreadsheet and make a highly tailored proposal for the customer.  In contrast, HP and Dell salespeople came in with generic, one-size-fits-all proposals (e.g., 4:1 consolidation for everything).  In contrast, IBM could propose that certain apps remain on dedicated servers, that a middle class of apps could be consilidated at various ratios from 2:1 to 8:1, and a third class of apps could be consolidated at 20:1 or higher.  

The customers were consistently stunned with the IBM proposal.  The proposal named systems that the customer recognized.  It gave supporting statistics for consolidation ratios.  The data could even be sorted the customer's servers into convenient groups according to their resource demands:  memory consumption, CPU consumption, and network consumption.  

As a special deal, I could look at the data and give them the names of apps that were memory leakers and CPU runaways.  I was using a bit of probability, but any Windows app that consumed all 4Gby of memory was either a database server or had a memory leak.  If the admin checked memory usage after the next schedule reboot, they could tell quickly (low memory after boot on a high memory consuming server meant memory leak).  The CPU looper was more speculative, but very few x86 servers actually needed their CPU capacity - most apps were (literally) 1% utilization or less.

As a result, the IBM salespeople presented the customer with highly detailed recommendations that could ben supported with data.  Recommendations that were tailored to the customer's actual needs.  Far better than one-size-fits-all from the other vendors.

Customers loved CDAT.  They would often quickly agree to a prototype - buy 5-10 servers from IBM xSeries and apply part of the consolidation plan using virtualization.  If this worked, the customer was positioned to buy more servers from IBM, ultimately replacing their server hardware.  

In the first year of CDAT use, IBM xSeries used it to secure about $10M in business.  The second year, $20M, and the third year, $40M.  Pretty good.  So good, that CDAT was eventually expanded to cover pSeries AIX systems for server consolidation.  the 

I have two regrets coming out of the experience.  I mentioned my poor choice of names above, and that is big.  Names like "Watson" or "BlueSphere" resonate with people.  The other regret is that I did not push and advocate CDAT as much as I should have.  My attidude was, "yeah, theis is cool, but it was pretty easy."  Bad answer.  The customers loved it, and I should have pushed hard to increase the exposure (within IBM) and add features.  My team could have been seen as the core of a $50M/year business.  Instead, we were neglected.  In retrospect, a missed opportunity on a large scale.  Not smart.

So that is the story of CDAT.

Here is a Computerworld article from 2007 that describes CDAT for public consumption.  As I left in 2005, CDAT outlived me by years.

https://www2.computerworld.co.nz/article/497013/ibm_takes_server_consolidation_tool_smbs/ 

Dated November 2007, the article reports in part:

IBM takes server consolidation tool to SMBs

IBM has just launched an analysis tool that it believes will help businesses find under-utilised x86 servers that could profitably be consolidated.

The vendor believes that server consolidation using virtualisation technology can save up to 60% in IT costs while quadrupling computing utilisation.

Big Blue has expanded its Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT) to allow IBM resellers and integrators to evaluate smaller environments of 50 servers or fewer. IBM says it is also providing an additional end-user service, Server Consolidation Factory, at US$500 (NZ$655) per 50 servers, which it claims is "up to five times less expensive than competitive services".

As an example, IBM integrator Mainline Information Systems performed a successful CDAT evaluation for a 575-employee client, Frankenmuth Mutual Insurance Company, a US-based property and casualty insurer, which has since virtualised its server farm.

A Quiet Week - 1 January 2023

Tradition dictates that the last week of the calendar year is a quiet one, and 2022 has been no exception.  We spent some holiday time in Eugene, OR (source of the photo is Spencer Butte) after a delay due to an ice storm (freezing rain).  It was a quiet drive home and some quiet days since.  We did get miscellaneous wind storms that required clean up and a snowstorm that required a bit of shovel work, but nothing serious.

Along with the clean up from the windstorms, I have continued pruning.  Yesterday, I pruned Grandma's climbing rose by our back deck.  We took some cuttings from the original Grandma's rose at Keats Island, rooted them, and planted them by the back deck.  I say "planted" - it was barely more than sticking them in the ground.  The cuttings have happily taken to their new location and provide color in the spring.  I plan to build a rose arbor this year to allow them to better flaunt their colors.  The original rose at the cabin continues, having survived the trauma of construction and the repeated attacks of local deer.  It is now on an ad-hoc trellis that keeps the bulk of the plants above the reach of deer, so it is also quite happy.  The Keats trellis was very much a spur-of-the-moment design from lumber on-hand, so I am now in the mode of continuous repairs.  Last summer, I had to realign a couple timbers and re-screw them together.  I tried to find a recent photo of the trellis but I seem to have focused my photographic energies on other interests.  I will have to get out the large ladder to accomplish anything in 2023.

To anyone reading - Happy New Year!  May 2023 bring successes and peace.

Twitter Blizzard - 21 December 2022

There has been a blizzard of commentary about the Musk takeover of Twitter and the consequences thereof.  My personal experience is that Twitter took a massive nosedive in the quality of the content and I have migrated to a Mastodon instance.  There remains a tumultuous debate about alternatives that replace Twitter, but there remains a singular problem that Twitter has solved and that is a barrier to entry for all alternatives.  Scale.

The "magic" of Twitter is not who owns it, who moderates it, or who subscribes.  These are all interesting and important factors, but they are not the key differentiator that made Twitter successful.  The key differentiator is that Twitter exchanges messages among millions of users in fractions of a second and creates a storehouse of comments that can be served up in seconds.  I could write code that collected short comments, microblog entries, and redistributes them, but it would handle a few hundred users, tops.  Much  more than that, and my little empire would fall over.  The good folks at Twitter have spent the last decade learning how to collect new entries, sort out subscribers, and redistribute those messages - and how to be efficient about it.  The blockchain/bitcoinage people designed a system that was intentionally inefficient while Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the others were seeking ultraefficiency at the scale of millions.  Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) used to say his strategy was "get big fast", but I think it would be more accurate to say "get big AND fast".  If you want a counter example, insurance companies and banks are big but hardly fast.

'Tis snowy outside.  Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Coffee as a metric of business success - 13 December 2022

Coffee was not always my favorite beverage.  For a long time, I drank tea, both hot and iced.  At some point in college, I learned to drink coffee.  It would be more accurate to say that I trained myself to drink coffee for in the early days I did not like the actual taste of coffee; I merely tolerated it because of the caffeine and the warmth.  

I was an engineering co-op student in college.  At Purdue University, this meant that one alternated semesters of work and school.  Freshman and Senior years were two semesters and the intervening Sophmore and Junior years were spread across three years' duration with work semesters filling the time.  In my case, I worked During one of the work semesters and decided that I needed coffee to keep up with my work and social plans.  This was reinforced by the fact that the company provided free coffee.  

The company was a small company that made medical computing equipment.  Today, we would call them a start-up, but then it was simply "a small company".  Several departments were under one roof - business, marketing, manufacturing, test, and engineering - and there was a designated cafeteria.  There was no food service, no microwave ovens, no refrigerators, and no vending machines, but there were tables, chairs, and a coffee pot.  It was the kind of coffee pot that used paper filters to hold the coffee grounds that was brewed into glass carafes.  A coffee service provide packets of coffee containing the proper measure of grounds.  I quickly learned how to brew coffee as I tended to come in (relatively) early, and this got me warm and moving in the morning.  

The company made medical equipment and computers.  The computers generated a lot of heat and needed to be kept cool.  Because they were all minicomputers, there was no computer room - the computers were everywhere and so the entire building was kept cold.  I took a sweater to work even in the summer, because it was so doggone cold.  To help counter the cold, I decided to start drinking coffee.

I started with everything to hid the tast of the coffee:  creamer and sugar.  The creamer and sugar helped to cut the acidity.  It was powdered creamer because we had no refrigerator for dairy products.  Over time, I eliminated the sugar and then the creamer and became a convert to black coffee.  

This rather stunning conversion was facilitated by the fact that the coffee was Yuban in foil packets.  The brand seems to have been lost, but Yuban was considered a premium coffee at the time as the foil packaging attests.  The foil sealed the coffee well and helped keep it fresh.  At the end of the semester, I wrapped up work and returned to my university studies.  When I returned, the company was still producing computerized medical equipment, but the business was not as high flying as when I had left: the development engineering of the new products was costing more than expected and competition had entered the market to grab for those sweet profits.  While I am sure there were many things done to control costs, the one that struck me as a co-op was the change in coffee.  From Yuban in foil packets, the supply changed to Folgers in plastic packets.  The corresponding change in coffee quality was noticecable, but I was not deterred and I resumed drinking black coffee.  After the semester passed, I returned to university, and then came back to work.  Competition was fierce in the medical computing business and more belt-tightening had been applied.  The coffee was still provided by the company, but it had been changed from Folgers in plastic bags to Mr. Nick-L-Cup in paper bags.  It was tough.  The coffee was not bad, but it really needed help.  I think I kept drinking it black, but I cut back.  By the time I returned to my studies, I had pretty much abandoned coffee and stayed that way for several years.  I went back to tea and did not return to coffee until I was able to grind and brew it fresh in my own kitchen.

The business metric in the title is a simple observation.  Companies are generous when the times are good, but when the quality and quantity of the benefits start dropping, it is a sign that the company is not doing well.

When I graduated, the company was doing well enough to make me an offer for a permanent position, but it was the lowest offer I received.  And, by that time, I was concerned about the future success of the company, so I took another offer.

Management by Objectives (MBO) replaced by Management by Skills (MBS) - 7 December 2022

Management By Objectives, MBO, is the traditional way to evaluate employees at ratings time, usually annually.  MBO might work well for routine work such as clerical situations, and it may work well for sales and support, but it fails when managing a research and development team.  For R&D, we need an evaluation framework that accounts for creativity, innovation, and unpredictability.  I have used Management by Skills for this purpose.

In the traditional MBO plan, the employee writes down a series of objectives for the rating period, about half a dozen.  Often the employee will be asked for four objectives, one per calendar quarter.  These objectives are "SMART" - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, and are usually written in the third-person voice.  Thus, an example might be "complete 100% of incoming requests within two working days".  The typical MBO embeds a lot of assumptions.  In this example, we assume the incoming work is enough to fill 40 hours per week, the individual tasks are not onerous (can be completed in a few hours), the incoming work is evenly distributed in time, how to resolve incoming tasks is well understood, and there is little or no prioritization of the incoming requests.  This simply does not describe an R&D environment.  In a research group or product development group, the tasks vary dramatically in scope and difficulty, some require invention while others are routine. The tasks usually arrive in clumps, and some tasks are much more important than others.  This variety is very difficult to oversee using MBO methods and metrics.

Furthermore, R&D is a career position and individuals want to grow, to get promoted.  It is not wise to promote someone for "just doing their job" - the manager will want to encourage people to learn and demonstrate new skills.  The skills can be specific, such as learning a particular technique, or the can be general, such as leadership or planning.  I addressed this by focusing on skills rather than objectives.

Management by Skills, MBS, defines a set of skills that are to be mastered and demonstrated by employees.  These skills are usually on a spectrum, from simple and small growing to complex and large as the employee's career advances.  The newly graduated employee cannot be expected to perform at the level of a 20-year veteran, at least not until that have had a chance to develop their skills.  The skills I identified for my team were derived from HR-provided documents and can be summarized as: flexibility, communications and listening, technical depth, technical breadth, scope of influence, leadership, and impact of decisions.  These may overlap in some situations but they describe important skills in an R&D workplace.  We take them one at a time.

Flexibility is required to survive the rapid pace of change in research and development.  The requirements for a project often change during the project as new information is uncovered.  Someone who is slow to adapt will fall behind as they work on tasks no longer relevant.  Someone who resists change will be eternally dissatisfied.  Those who embrace change and flex with it will focus on the right tasks and have the greatest success.  There is no convenient metric of flexibility and this skill is usually best measured using examples, both pro and con.

Communications and listening.  This is usually listed as "communications" and that can cause one to lose sight of the fact that communications is two-way.  A one-way communications method has a name - broadcast.  Communications also comes in many forms - written & spoken, formal & informal, in person and electronicly, individual and in groups of varying sizes.  In today's world,  a successful researcher cannot only publish and a successful developer cannot only use email.  One must learn to use successfully a variety of forms.  An employee who communicates only with peers may succeed but they will not likely advance until they learn to speak with management.  Finally, success at the highest tiers requires the ability to work with large groups, and someone who communicates a lot but has little effect will be left behind.  As before, there is no convenient metric for communications and listening; it is not sufficient to count papers, technical reports, pages written, or talks given.  This skill is usually best measured using examples where the communications had an impact.

Technical depth is usually what the more junior employees focus on, identifying all the clever tasks they completed.  Technical depth remains an important skill, but it must be evaluated in the larger context of the full set of skills.  In other words, the employee will not be promoted if they lack technical skills, but they will not be promoted if they show only their technical skills.  Technical depth has no easy metric and can be best evaluated with comparisons to (anonymized) colleagues and peers.  Technical depth can sometimes be measured using feedback from peers, such as from talks or papers, or using independent counts such as patents or peer-reviewed publications.

Technical breadth is often paired with technical depth.  An employee who is "a kilometer wide and a millimeter deep" will not succeed.  One needs to show a willingness to take on tasks that require one to learn new skills, and build on those skills.  As a positive feedback loop, skills in a new area can often be applied to familiar problems and generate new solutions.  Technical breadth has no easy metric and can be best evaluated with comparisons to (anonymized) colleagues and peers.

Scope of influence is an important skill to demonstrate.  Presentations given and papers published must be converted into research and development results.  An idea that never leaves the lab has little or no value.  This skill goes beyond simple formulas or techniques - the ability to influence another often depends on communications skills.  A good idea presented badly is unlikely to be adopted in practice.  Influence ultimately comes back around.  When people seek out the employee for advice and ideas, that employee has a broad influence on the organization.  The metric to use here is typically based on examples, especially when the employee causes existing practice to be changed.

Impact of decisions is closely related to scope of influence, but focuses more on the magnitiude of the resulting changes.  The metric can measure efficiency changes (e.g., process improvements), dollar impact on the business, or the scale of the change (local to a group or product to across an entire corporation or product suite).

Leadership is probably the hardest and most dynamic skill to measure.  It is even hard to define.  Early in one's career, leadership is often assigned by management, but later in one's career, leadership is earned.  In one's early career, an employee can be assigned to oversee an intern or a more junior employee.  As one's career advances, the employee will identify opportunies that need addressing and assemble the required skills and team members.  While the junior leader is assigned by management, the senior leader tells managers what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Evaluating employees is a difficult task and changes with the environment and the individuals participating.  This note summarizes some techniques that can be used for effective evaluations in a research and development environment.

Domestic Terrorism in the US - 6 December 2022

Headlines are buzzing with fragmentary reports of an attack on power substations in Moore County, North Carolina.   It could have happened anywhere, but the reports out of NC say that one or more people broke down a fence and shot up a power substation.  Well, two power substations.  This has resulted in power outages for 40,000 customers of Duke Power.  The exact methods of the attack are not very surprising.  It feels like every year a squirrel takes out a power substation, so using guns and trucks is not a major advance.  That it is human-done seems to be the surprise this time.

We should not be surprised.  In fact, we should have been prepared.

On 12 September 2001, we were back at work and wondering what could happen next.  What could the international terrorists do after the attacks on the Pentagon in Washington DC and the Twin Towers of New York?  My regular lunch crowd was sure that 9/11 was but the first of a series of attacks and we debated what would come next.  Perhaps someone would drive a truck of explosives half-way across a major hydro dam and blow up the dam, depriving Las Vegas and LA of power and drowning anyone downstream?  Perhaps someone would ship checked bags in airlines - good thing that airlines were grounded.  Perhaps someone would dump a truck full of chemicals into a reservoir and poison a city?  Trains, planes, trucks, cars, chemicals, nukes, gas clouds - we came up with quite a list.   After a bit of debate, because that is what engineers approach problems, we realized that the luncheon spot had gone silent and everyone was watching us, so we quickly changed to the latest baseball scores.  In the following days, it became clear that this was a one-shot attempt and that the terrorist group did not have a sustained plan of terror.  Airplanes were again allowed to fly and security at the airports was beefed up.

The aspect we did not examine was the international terrorist.  We took that as a given.  We never considered that domestic terrorists would play this deadly game.  The Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans, to name a few, have continued to attack the United States through cyber means but no one has really tried to attack using conventional means.  We must be honest with ourselves:  in the last 20 years, if a foreign agency had been determined to execute a physical attack, they would have launched it by now and there is a good chance that at least one attempt would have succeeded in doing some damage.  I certainly do not wish for this, but no defense is perfect for 20 years.

After watching the development of self-described "militias" in the US, it is painfully clear that one or more of them are going to do something stupid.  This particular attack in NC could be the result of excessive beer by some dimwits, but the synchronization of mutiple sites simultaneously indicates some forethought and training was pursued.

So I think there are two lessons here that must lead to action plans.  First, we need to watch the militias and bring them to heel.  I would argue the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is included here, but we know that these self-described militias (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the rest) are actively seeking opportunities to do something stupid.  We must find them and stop them.

Second, we need to strengthen the digital protections of our infrastructure.  This threat is greater than a power substation.  This threat covers power, water, gas, and communications.  The SCADA systems must be upgraded to block false access,  other computer systems must be self-policing, the physical assets must be hardened to prevent access, and surveillence of the physical assets must be improved.  

Some might cry out that these steps are an imposition by an overreaching government intent on control, but these are protective acts and not offensive actions.  We must protect ourselves against enemies, foreign and domestic.

Vacation Restrictions - 27 November 2022

This recollection dates to many years ago, about 1986 or so.  I started work for United Airlines (at the time, later to become Covia and now named something else that escapes me).  UAL had a lot of rules that felt odd in an IT position, but they derived from the union rules that governed most of the employees (pilots, flight attendants, and ground-based staff).  The vacation rules were of particular note.

1. Each employee earned X days per month worked.  In the end, a new employee earned ten days (two weeks) per year, but they accumulated.  since I started in June, I was accumulating a week of vacation in that year.  

2. The vacation accumulated in year Y could be used in year Y+1.  As I was earning vacation in 1986, I could use it in 1987.  

As a result, in the first eighteen months I worked for UAL, I had one week of vacation to use.  After that, it settled into the two-week norm, but that first year and a half was tough.

Jouralists say Amazon Alexa to lose $10 Billion in 2022 - 23 November 2022

Journalists at Business Insider are claiming that the hardware division of Amazon is on track to lose $10 Billion (with a B) in 2022 because of Alexa.  The story has been picked up by other news sources and is being repeated as factual.  Let us look closer at the claims.

The report at Ars Technica says:

The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year.

Engineers are paid a lot of money and they get a lot of benefits, so engineers are expensive.  Engineers at high-tech Internet companies are paid even better than average (e.g., Facebook and Google engineers are better paid than AMD and Intel engineers).  To understand the situation, we need to make some assumptions.

First, although the article blames "the vast majority" of the losses on Alexa, let us just assume all the losses are due to Alexa and stick with the $10B.  Further, let us assume that Alexa makes no money and that $10B represents the entire cost of the Alexa organization.  Other articles claim that hardware products are sold "at cost", so we assign zero to the cost of consumer products sold (the cost will equal the income, therefore having no impact on our estimates).  As a generous guess, let us assume that the annual cost of an engineer is $500000 (half a million bucks), including benefits and overhead (building rent, computer equipment, heat, health benefits, stock grants, and so on).  This is high, but it is an average across engineers and it is based on industry knowledge.  

If we take the claimed loss of $10B and divide by the $500K, we get 20000 engineers.  I am pretty confident that Amazon does not have 20K engineers working in the hardware division.  Elsewhere in the article, it is claimed that Amazon as a whole is eliminating 10K jobs (e.g., CNBC report) out of 1 million or more employees.  But remember that most of those 1 million jobs are at the entry level in the warehouses (fulfillment centers) and are about $15/hour or about $30K annualized.  Converting that to a "loaded salary" is still only about $60K per year, so it would take almost 170K employees to achieve a $10B savings in lay-offs.

So if the number of laid-off employees does not match the headline, it must be the amount of the losses that is wrong.  And I submit the losses are exaggerated.  Significantly exaggerated.  

Because we are talking about sad things like lay-offs, I have attached a picture of a cat as a palate cleanser.

The ABC trifecta of Art, Blockchain, and Crypto - 17 November 2022

Music is not often associated with technology, but this Spotify track offers brilliant treatment of the blockchain and crypto circus that has gripped techbros for the last couple years.

Crypto $oy or Crypto Boy.

I am not sure how to insert the "bitcoin currency" symbol that the artist uses, so I had to insert a dollar sign.  salem ilese has created a nice ballad for your favorite crypto enthusiast.  To be complete, I further acknowledge the songwriting skills of Alma Goodman, Henry Tucker, Marc Sibley, Nathan Cunningham, and salem ilese.

ETA: put the year 2022 in the Title.

The balance on Twitter is shifting, 17 November 2022

Famously, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla fame has purchased Twitter.  As part of his plan to remake the corporation, he announced a plan to lay-off 3/4ths of the staff.  Not a typo, that is 75% of the people to be fired. Oh, that is bad, said public perception.  In a thoughtful moment, Elon backed off and laid off "only" half.  Not a typo, that is 50% were fired within about three (3) weeks.  I am not sure how he expected to keep the company running after that, but Twitter has not fallen over.

Once all the fuss about the lay-offs died down, Elon imposed a sudden work-from-office requirement:  40 hours per week in the office, minimum.  Although I have concerns about the long-term success of unfettered WFH (work-from-home), that was the Twitter policy and the suddeness of Elon's dictate was extreme.  A target date and time for transition plans would have been reasonable (assuming the target date was into 2023).  

Not content, Elon announced a further 5% trim of staff, another lay-off in which the managers were required to identify a further 5% of the staff as low performers.  Yeah, always a popular move.

Finally, Elon send out an email message that required staff to commit to unpaid overtime, a loyalty oath, and (I suspect) consent to absurd delivery schedules.  Failure to commit was essentially volunteering to get laid off.

As a consequence of any layoff, there are collateral resignations.  The targeted population to be laid off may be the low performers and the low revenue groups (a common assertion), but the untargeted resignations are usually the very people who can get another job quickly.  Those would include your top performers.  The remainder are a mix of the true believers, the ones who are "stuck" (e.g., because of health care), and the inertial.  This is not always the employee base that you would want to retain.

In effect, Elon has now laid off 3/4ths of the Twitter staff and achieved his original intent, except for the "retain top talent" objective.

In compensation, I offer you a photograph of a sleeping cat. 

When appliances fail - 15 November 2022

Appliances should last a really long time, but they never do.  They are simple devices, usually made from simple materials, but they seem designed to fail long before their time.  Take the typical American water heater.  It is basically a tank of pressurized water with a gas or electric heater in the body of the tank.  There is a thermostat to control the temperature of the water, and the thermostat controls the heating unit.  In my case, the thermostat controls a gas valve.  Unlike a gas furnace, the pilot light is lit all the time and the "waste" heat from the pilot light goes into the water in the tank.  When the temperature falls below the set-point of the thermostat, the gas valve is actuated and the pilot light ignites the burner.  When the water gets sufficiently hot, the gas valve is closed and the burner goes out.  Insulation keeps the hot water hot while the burner is off. 

No pump in, no pump out, nothing active but the gas valve.  Unfortunately, there is a bit of aging due to the thermal expansion and contraction of the hot water, and more due to the various minerals in the water.  There is simply not much to fail, so why does a water heater last only about a decade?  

Our last water heater was installed in spring of 2005, so it lasted about 17-1/2 years.  It did not fail dramatically, but it was failing, so I replaced it.  I was living on "borrowed time" and I decided to replace it in a controlled manner rather than waiting for a dramatic failure at an inconvenient time.

Manufacturers should design the water heaters to be more robust.  The cost of the water heater would go up, but if a minor increment in cost doubled the expected life of a water, it would be a win for the consumer.  On the other hand, the current system rewards mediocre designs (manufacturers sell more water heaters) and the installation (plumbing) business installs more water heaters.  The consumer does not get the "best product", they get the product that generates the greatest profits for the manufacturers and installers.

The other problem with appliances is that Nothing Is Standardized.  It is just a water heater.  There should be some standard connections at standard locations and the units should come in standard sizes.  Then the installer would just disconnect the old unit, connect in the new unit, and be done.  However, the installer had to spend hours adjusting the installation process so that the water heater would fit into the space.  If you look closely, there are three (3) foam disks under the water heater; one is needed to insulate the heater from the cement floor (saves energy), but this install as three because the water heater was too low.  The gas connection is weird (the new water heater is the same diameter as the old water heater, but it just did not fit).  And the safety valve had to be soldered into exhaust plumbing with a custom fit.  This is really stupid.  If the connecterization were the same on all water heaters, it would save hours of labor at install time.  We faced a similar problem with the furnaces - they all seem to be custom installations.  And do not get me started about kitchen standards.  

The good news is that we have hot water for the next decade or so.

Checking in - 7 November 2022

Winterizing has been the name of the game for the last few weeks.   This comes from three factors.

Due to benign neglect, I have let some shrubs get overgrown over the years.  The resulting blooms have been gorgeous, but we now have a lot of shrubs that are too large for their location.  Several have been blocking windows while others are encroaching over the lawn and some are just too large and tangled to be healthy.  

Then we had a windstorm on Friday or Saturday night.  This storm created yet more lawn and garden waste than the maintenance pruning.  We have a lot of large trees, and the wind came from a direction that pruned the upper parts of the trees, dumping the branches and needles on our house and lawn.

Finally, the decidious trees are dropping their leaves.  The pine needles are coming down, too, to make room for new growth on the evergreens.  

Any one of these could generate a lot of organic waste that we put in the lawn-and-garden bin for pickup.  However, all of them together overwhelm the 96-gallon capacity of the weekly bin, so I get out the chipper-shredder and make mulch. 

The chipper-shredder is an old one and I do not know how much longer I will have it.  I bought it from a catalog company when we lived in Chicago.  That would have been in the 1980s.  I loaned it to a friend for use in the autumn and he kept it for the winter.  Unfortunately, he was not aware of the maintenance requirement to drain the gas tank (or treat the gas), and the chipper would not start after he returned it.  He moved away shortly thereafter, so the chipper followed us to Massachusetts and then to Washington.  I am not much of a mechanic, so I did not really know how to fix this.  The chipper weighs a lot, maybe 75-90 pounds, and it is large, so I could not figure out how to get it to a repair shop.  And so it sat, moved dutifully with us as we bounced around the country.  

A few years ago, I got bold.  I bought some cleaner sprays (e.g., carb cleaner) and started poking at it.  I could get it to run by spraying carb cleaner down the throat of the carburator, so that suggested to me that the problem was rooted in the stale and evaporated fuel rather that some outright mechanical failure.  I carefully disassembled the engine, not really knowing what I was doing.  I sprayed everything I could find with the carburator cleaner and I sprayed all the moving parts with WD-40, then I reassembled it as carefully as I could.  In particular, there was some oddly shaped bit of plastic that I carefully placed back.  I am just guessing here, but I think that was the fuel pump.  Anyway, I got it all back together without any "extra" parts, so I put in fresh fuel and tried to start it up.

It started.

I was amazed.  I ran it for a bit so ensure this was not some start-only magic, and it has been working reliably ever since.  I am careful to run out the fuel in the autumn, and it keeps chugging away.  The only other maintenance is to sharpen the blades and change the oil.  The chipper manufacturer is no longer in business, but the engine is Briggs & Stratton, so I can probably get parts when that becomes necessary.  I hope.  In the meantime, I keep running it so that I can try to keep up with the organic waste that I am generating.

  

Visitors in the side yard, 30 October 2022 (15 October 2022)

 Bobcats, I think.

There are three, perhaps a small family unit on the prowl.  

Original image: 15 October 2002 in the middle of the afternoon.

ETA: formatting.

In the balance on Twitter, 30 October 2022

Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter on Thursday, 27 October 2022.  There has been a lot of speculation about what this means, especially for free speech and civility.  So far, Musk has repeatedly said that there are no changes as of yet, and he has appointed a committee to review current policies and recommend changes.  Musk declares himself to be a "free-speech absolutist" which most people seem to believe is a statement that the Nazis and nut-cases will be allowed free reign.  I have been trying to withhold judgement to see where Musk takes Twitter.  I am not optimistic, but neither am I at the panic-and-run stage.  

Then, today, this report surfaced.  It seems that Musk replied to a tweet by Hillary Clinton about the attack on Paul Pelosi and cited an article in a newspaper declaring that Pelosi is gay and the attacker is a prostitute, the attack was about a lovers dispute, and that Pelosi was in his underwear.  The FOX station that reported the underwear has since withdrawn their report, and the newspaper turns out to be a Qanon-aligned craphole of a news site.  Musk defended the tweet with weaselwords about "it seems", but he eventually deleted the tweet after the condemnations grew.  This is not sufficient.  Musk is an adult and should know better than to spew unsubstantiated drivel to his millions of (Twitter) followers.  

The point of this note is two-fold.  First, Musk needs to have an adult nearby at all times to supervise him (that is advice based on prudence; I am not proposing any sort of law).  Musk's failure to heed this idea will contribute to his $42 Billion collapse, and that will be penalty enough.  Second, I am concerned that Twitter will indeed become a cesspool of drivel.  This suggests that I will not be using Twitter a year from now.

Halloween is approaching, so I have attached a photo of a neighbor's decorations.  Happy Halloween!

When in Nantes, 28 October 2022 (9 September 2022)

Distractions kept me from posting photos from our recent travels.  I shall take steps to remedy this oversight.

In September, 2022, we traveled to France and Greece for long planned and long postponed vacations.  After repeated delays and changes, the travel followed a three-part structure.  The first part was a week of vacation in France near Bordeau and Perigord, a week of being in the "delegation" in Nantes, and a week of sailing in Greece.  

On our first night in Nantes, we had dinner that featured the local tradition of crepes made of buckwheat, dining al fresco.  We stayed in an unusual hotel - Micr'Home - and took in art throughout the town.  The walking was good and helped us fight the insidious tendrils of jetlag.

The destinations of the first week required that we pick up a rental car at the Nantes airport.  We traveled with our son, A, to Les Epesses, home of the famed Puy du Fou historical theme park.  Puy du Fou is an interesting place.  On the one hand, it is a bit schmaltzy (campy) for Americans, but it is extremely well done and a lot of fun.  Various bits of history have passed by or near a chateau near Les Epesses, and these historical facts are turned into spectacles.  For example, there is evidence that Romans were nearby and so there is a colloseum with a spectacular show that involves chariot races, wild animals, and gladiators.  There is evidence that Vikings raided in the area, so there is a spectacular show that involves a Viking longship and burning barns.  Laperouse, a famous explorer, is featured in an exhibit about his explorations because he was born in the nearby town. 

I seem to be having trouble with the blogging tool, so I will stop (albeit abruptly) and continue in the next post.

It took me a couple minutes, 28 October 2022

Reading bumperstickers is an old hobby of mine.  I have been reading them for years.  I do not know why as most are pretty boring.  "My child is the honor student of the week", or someone's favorite politician, or "Wall Drugs".  So when I run across an interesting one, it is a secret pleasure.

In the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, an unusual bumpersticker was found.  It took me a few minutes to work it out, so I will delay the reveal to give you, dear reader, a chance to read the secret message.

Another odd hobby of mine is to read license plates.  Well, not merely read them, but interpret them.  Today, personalized license plates are common and "reading" a plate is a common game.  However, at one point, license plates were not personalized and they all seemed to use a single format:  AAA NNN, or three letters and three numbers.  I suspect this simple rule was the result of sample bias, but it held true for many years in my experience.  I used to interpret the AAA letters as computer instructions.  "BRA 565" became 'BRAnch", "BNE 354" became "Branch if Not Equal", "ADC 757" became "ADd with Carry", "LDA 324" became "LoaD Accumulator", and so.  Not all three-letter groups had actual instructions that correspond to anything I had seen or used, so part of the game was to make up instructions that fit.  A famous example would have been "HCF 523" for "Halt and Catch Fire".  A silly little game that kept me alert on many long highway trips.

In my first reading of the curious bumpersticker, I thought about convenient substitutions that might resolve into something, and that thought is partially right.  I finally realized the entire expression does not resolve into one thing, rather there are independent pieces that resolve into separate things that, in turn, combine into the meaning.  The key was to realize that there is nothing one can do to reduce the square root of minus one except i.  Yes, one could stick in Euler's formula (e^(i*pi)+1=0), but that is more complex rather than simpler.  So we have, potentially, three tokens and the middle one is "i".  (As an engineer, I might try to put in a j rather than an i, but let us put that aside.)  That leaves the E/c^2 and the PV/nR.

Well, the first E that comes to mind is Einstein's - E=mc^2.  This immediately reduces to mc^2/c^2, or m.  This give us "mi" plus a third token.

By inspection, it is clear the third token is a play on the ideal gas law: PV=nRT.  If you take the ideal gas law and rearrange it to put the P, V, n, and R terms on one side, we are left with T.

Our solution is: miT, normally written MIT, and that is consistent with the playful spirit of the puzzle.  Do you have an alternative solution?

Jibe 1 - sloppy use of cases, and an educated person would use formulae that have uppercase M and I.

Jibe 2 - a graduate of a proper engineering university would know that j is the correct terminology for imaginary numbers and this was clearly created by a mathematician rather than an engineer.